Friday, March 9, 2018

Through a Glass Darkly

It has often been said that love involves a temporary
madness. It’s a little like Midsummer Night’s Dream where the world is turned
upside down in order to produce the kinds of idealizations and distortions
which allow individuals to fall for each other. Once the dreamer wakes up, he
or she will either find that the legacy of passion turns out to be a
relationship or merely a one-night stand. The creative process like love also
depends on a temporary madness, if only because the artist like Orpheus must
descend in to the underworld to find his Eurydice. Ingmar Bergman is a case in
point. Bergman was probably the greatest artist of his time, arguably greater
than Picasso, Joyce, Eliot or any of the other modernists, due to innovations
he brought to his chosen form, cinema, and to the profundity of his insights in
to the human condition and in particular human kind’s tortured search for
divinity. He was the Shakespeare of the twentieth century. But what was the
price that had to be paid? From all accounts Bergman was not someone most
people would have liked to have known more or less to be involved with
romantically or any other way. Through a
Glass Darkly, currently in revival at Film Forum, tells the story of the siblings of a novelist, who is an
absent father. Incest and insanity constitute the film’s major themes. If we
assume that the film has some autobiographical elements (it was shot on Faro,
the island where Bergman lived), it’s plain that the director had no reticence
about exploiting the very misery he himself had something to do with creating.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.